Nathan is hurt. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought it was funny.”
Ginny looks like she is considering storming off to her room, but instead she chooses to smile.
“It was funny, Dad.”
Nathan takes over the sandwiches. The soup is beginning to heat, so he puts a few slabs of butter on the griddle and lets them melt.
“Where do you think Mom is?”
“She’s probably with her cousins. You know, the ones in Utica.”
He places sandwiches on the griddle as he lies. He called the distant cousins days ago and had an uncomfortable conversation, as they of course hadn’t seen Marion.
“Yeah, but they don’t like her,” Ginny says. “No one really does. She doesn’t have any friends.”
“People like your mom.”
“No. She makes people feel weird about themselves. They need her. That’s different.”
“Need her for what?”
“I don’t know. Whatever it is they don’t feel like doing. Dad, the soup.”
The soup has formed into one large bubble and risen to the brim of the pot. Nathan turns off the heat.
“I mean, did you like her when you first met her?” Ginny asks, eating a piece of cheese from the cutting board.
“Of course I did,” he says, but he doesn’t remember.
He ladles soup into two bowls and slices two sandwiches into triangles. They carry the meal to the den and turn on the television. As they watch an episode, Nathan texts Denise warnings: Don’t come over, my daughter’s home.
After lunch and television watching, Ginny and Nathan clean the kitchen. In the course of this rote activity, Nathan thinks it over and becomes sure once again that Marion would never embezzle. He shouldn’t have let Anna scare him. The money in the shoebox is a kind of Sheepshead Bay practice that Nathan doesn’t know about. But the abandoned phone and the credit cards: what does that mean? He returns to his disbelief.
Ginny interrupts his inner monologue by saying that she will attempt to do her homework. Many of the texts are online, she admits, but she needs to purchase them. Nathan gives her a credit card from his wallet, and she runs the plastic rectangle along her fingers quietly.
Nathan watches her and is grateful that Jane doesn’t understand what’s happening. A few tantrums, a few meltdowns, but other than that, she’s going about her days. Ginny, on the other hand, taps a mysterious Morse code with the credit card on the kitchen table and then, after a low hum, leaves. He hears her climb the stairs, and, so quickly he doesn’t investigate the feeling, he believes it could be Marion.
When Nathan wrote, he would often go looking for Marion when he was stuck, or when he was pleased. He could read lines to her, tell her his latest word count, his latest email from his publisher. It’s been a while since he’s had one of those emails, but it’s undeniable in the kitchen that Nathan has something to say.
He closes his eyes and deliberately pretends it is Marion going up the stairs. Her heavy gait. Her exhalation at the top of the stairs. Nathan opens his eyes and calls up, “I’m going to work too. Let’s work together.” His office is next to his daughter’s bedroom. Her door is open, and she’s sitting in front of her laptop. Nathan can barely stand how industrious he feels.
In his office, he turns on his computer. He usually works off a legal pad, but today it’s just going to happen. This isn’t a poem; this is something large, this is something to send to his old publisher: My wife left me, and it opened all these doors, it just flowed—here is my pain!
Blank document up, Nathan taps away. It’s coming easily; he’s writing for Marion in absentia. An hour passes this way.
“I’m at nine hundred and eighty-seven words!” he yells to Marion.
“What?” Ginny responds.
Board of Trustees
How did this happen? Who let this happen?
Good afternoon to you, too, Anna. Pleasure to see you, as always.
Who let the Palm girl be suspended?
No one let her. It was that history teacher. The one who wears the socks with the, you know, Bible verse.
She was insistent, and then George felt like it was an issue of consistency and fairness—
It was a coup.
How could it be a coup? The teachers don’t know anything.
Oh, they know. They know.
They’re just trying to make themselves feel important. Involved. Necessary.
Aren’t they?
Whatever.
It’s only for three days.
We can offer to expunge it from her record.
The Palms will never forget. We protect the Palms. Doesn’t George know that? Wasn’t that made clear to him?
I think this Marion business has the faculty questioning their priorities. And to be fair, Ginny has become harder to handle now that her mother is gone.
Nathan’s never going to forgive us.
He will if he has to, if we threaten to send his criminal wife to prison where she belongs.
Isn’t that…What is that called? Extortion?
Well. We wouldn’t necessarily have to be formal about it.
Strategy
During recess, Jane explains certain things about the courtyard to the missing boy. She tells him who plays where: the popular girls stay on the monkey bars, the fourth-grade boys by the tetherball court, the nerdy kids by the ginkgo trees. That’s where Jane should belong, by the ginkgoes, but she never has. The nerds find her playing style too romantic.
The missing boy and Jane sit on a pair of swings and swing high. She would like to see over the cast iron fence separating the courtyard from the street, because her mother might be out there. Would it be okay if they looked?
Jane knows the missing boy is nonverbal, so she just assumes he approves of her idea, because he starts pumping his legs stronger and higher. Jane does the same, and they shoot up. Jane leans forward and back, forward and back, and yet she cannot see over the fence. They oscillate back down. Time for Plan B.
In order to get to the fence, she says, you have to climb into no-man’s-land, the flower beds. The flower beds are sectioned off by a low railing, but the teachers are vigilant in their patrol. They need a diversion. A gift: the ill-located zip-line. The zip-line is for middle schoolers, and only with adult supervision. Concussions have been common since it was installed. Jane encourages a solitary first grader to give it a go when the teacher isn’t looking. The tiny girl launches herself into a large maple tree, and the teachers come running. Jane and the missing boy make their move.
They squeeze through the bare Brooklyn bushes and reach the severe cast iron bars that surround the school. Jane and the missing boy wrap their hands around the bars and look out. Parked cars, more trees, a row of brownstones, but no people.
Don’t worry, the missing boy says. We’ll find her.
The missing boy’s words settle Jane in a way that her father’s words can’t. The boy’s words remind her of her mother’s words, even though he sounds different.